


End Or Beginning

by ScriveSpinster



Series: Urchins in the High Wilderness [4]
Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, Sunless Skies
Genre: Ficlet, Future Fic, Gen, myths and legends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 11:37:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19250422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScriveSpinster/pseuds/ScriveSpinster
Summary: The Violet-eyed Wanderer is a storyteller in Pan.





	End Or Beginning

The Violet-eyed Wanderer is a storyteller in Pan.

It’s dangerous work, for in this stretch of Wilderness where few things are forbidden, even the hint of a narrative, the scrap of a tale, carries penalties harsher than death. But it’s work she’s suited for, this scattering of words on the wind, and where she goes, they tell stories of her in turn: that she doesn’t remember her own name, for she traded it away, long ago, for something she needed more. That she is, like the Waif whose name she once shared, a keeper of lost and unwanted things. That she has in her possession a scrap of searing knowledge, a key to unlock any door, a cloak of forgetting that lets her evade the gaze of suns. There is some falsehood to all of them, and some truth, and she’ll tell you, if you ask, that it’s not her place to say where one meets the other. But she _doesn’t_ remember her name, though she knows she had one once, and she remembers only fragments of where she came from. The Nadir takes as much as it gives, and there isn’t much left of her without a lost cause to hang herself on – but lost causes have never been in short supply. 

The heart of the story, the meat of it, is this: she couldn’t save her brothers and sisters in childhood. Now, she finds them where she can, and others besides – the orphaned and the faceless, those who fled the wrath or service of the Crown, those with nowhere else to go. She gathers them about her in a ragged congregation, and they make their temporary homes in the spaces where stars don’t see.

Should you find them in your travels, at the edge of some black Well with icy winds screaming around you, or in some ruined library at the border of the world, take a seat by the fire. There is no need to fear; old habits might die hard, but guests are sacred, and an audience more sacred still. They will fill your ears with songs you won’t be soon forgetting, and myths that strike as deep as any blade: of the first snake in the first garden, and the saint suspended in sacrifice, and the old king’s lonely grave.

The Wanderer will watch, with light in her strange eyes and her cloak of forgetfulness about her, and tap her hand idly against her leg in time to a rhythm she knows. She might tell you secrets, but they will slip away by morning, leaving only the lilt of a flute, the blaze of a fire built at the edge of a monument to lightless cold, the shape of a story with an ending still unwritten.

Ask, and she will tell you this: that in the first myth she learned, it is not light that made the world, but speech. That a word cannot be unspoken, but a tale can be told and told anew, and differently every time – and she is not the only one among her lost congregation with a quest failed and then transfigured. 

Theirs will be a liberation not brought by bombs. They concern themselves with the breaking of chains, the end of eternity and the freeing of things in Wells.

**Author's Note:**

> If you’re wondering, the Violet-Eyed Waif is the urchin you meet if you choose to help the urchins during the Mr Sacks story in Fallen London, and her goal is to understand what makes Veils tick so she can free the Foreign Office’s Choir from his influence. It’s not canon that she’s been irrigo’d up, but as far as I’m concerned, the urchins’ ties to the Nadir + violet eyes suggest it.
> 
> (Also: yes, I know I’m leaving out the spiders.)


End file.
